VR Vinyl

For our final project, I chose to flesh out music albums through immersing the audience in their cover art. Through creating these worlds, I hoped to better capture the tone of the music through creating a more detailed and interactive world. I created this project with the same intent as visual albums, such as Lemonade, which aim to provide more context to their music.

Unfortunately, the SteamVR component would not sink with the headset properly despite hours of editing various components. So, this documentation shows a full play through of the experience using keyboard and mouse controls, and in VR just the headset is connected but this is what the actual experience would look like.

Virtual Reality Portrait

I was inspired by the center image I’m using of Hayao Miyazaki, in which his face is constructed out of his characters. The concept I’m going for is portraying an artist by creating a collage of their work and the tools of their trade (paper with sketches for Miyazaki). This is something I feel could be translated to a variety of other artists if finding/animating models for Miyazaki’s characters proves too difficult.

 

Miyazaki portrait

 

 

Closet

Try living in one for a couple minutes:

Closet

 

This assignment was to transport the viewer to a new place or point of view, and I interpreted that in the vein of Virtual Reality, The Empathy Machine. I began by thinking about the idea of claustrophobia and how you have this small, maneuverable camera that can place people into spaces humans cannot fit in. Originally I wanted to film in crowded subways, packed elevators, and similar spaces that make people uncomfortable to be in physically. From this we could examine how discomfort is replicated despite lacking a physical presence for the viewer to worry about.

I was probably looking for a more narrative path when my brainstorming made the leap to being trapped in the closet. The resulting film has the viewer inside a small closet while Robbi, its owner, discloses his experiences with embracing his sexuality. We also recorded a segment about how his clothes relate to his identity, which I would include in a longer version of this piece. I encountered some difficulties in that the Ricoh Theta was not charged when I acquired it, and we only had a limited time to film. The multiple cuts you see are the result of the camera powering off in the middle of shots, and I would have preferred this to be a single take. In a larger version of this piece I would like to showcase a variety of people’s stories as the viewer inhabits their closets, because the lgbtq+ community features a very wide range of experiences with expression and acceptance.

Do Not Drink: Paint Cup

http://www.taborrobak.com/2017/

Where’s My Water?, 2015

 

Upon stepping into Tabor Robak’s second solo gallery from 2015, Fake Shrimp, one is greeted not by framed paintings, but rather by glowing screens boasting vividly colored animations. On one wall stands the behemoth, Where’s My Water?. Twelve 55” HD screens are pulled together in a 3 by 4 grid to form this, “tour-de-force still-life[…]that is anything but still”(The Met). Where’s My Water? depicts highly detailed renderings of containers and the objects they have been made to contain. The first of which is a drinking glass, into which is dropped, one-by-one, a collection of sharpies, pens, eraser pens, and a penknife. This whole video art, sculpture-in-motion rotates on the background of a slightly surreal sunset. Once the objects stop falling, party balloons rise from the bottom of the screen until they form a clump dividing the screen horizontally, and the screen shifts to a Taz, souvenir, oversized cup. This container is filled with kitchen tools and features a manta ray gliding around the environment, causing ripples. This combination of people’s everyday tools and containers, paired with surreal environments and transitions, creates a constantly unexpected and mesmerizing monumentalization of craftsmanship.

While pencils, pens, paper clips, and push pins may seem like mundane objects, they are tools people use everyday to accomplish their life’s work. One of Where’s My Water?’s containers is the animator’s, the next is the hedge fund manager’s, another is the astrology student’s, the home chef’s, the news producer’s, and they all express their owners’ passions through their tools. These vignettes represent crafts that require immense amounts of time, organization, and discipline to master. Video art’s container and its tools are technology, and while there are many physical, sculptural aspects of video art, Robak’s speciality is in software proficiency and animation. He is suggesting to the viewer to think of how, despite lacking a collection of physical instruments, his mastery of animation is comprised of a wide variety of techniques and digital tools, which are displayed in Where’s My Water?.

Many of these specific techniques actually recur in multiple pieces of his, making these his motifs. In another one of Robak’s pieces, Dog Park, birds can been seen flying above the scene, and paint drops fall from the top of the screen to splatter upon the environment. In Where’s My Water?’s Ragu container full of colored pencils, the transition into the next container features these same paint splatters to obscure the screens. When the paint clears, what emerges could be the college student’s container, overflowing with cheap pens and plastic utensils alike, with flocks of familiar birds flying in the background as the entire scene floats in the sky. One of the piece’s self contained motifs is surreal marine life, such as the aforementioned manta ray and a jellyfish later swimming around another container. There are also three scenes that break the flow of not-still lifes, and these are when mugs labelled with “FPS 30”, “FPS 60”, and “FPS 120”, for each scene respectively, hurtle towards the ground and shatter in slow motion before returning to the regularly scheduled program chock full of technical prowess. Lastly, this piece, along with most of his work, is a perfect loop. Robak is a, “prodigy of digital effects who was doing commercial work by the time he was a teen”(The Met), and this wealth of technological expertise has afforded him a position in defining the genre of video art.

However, his impossibly detailed, digital pencils call back to the well-established, artistic principles that still serve as his foundation. From Robak’s color schemes, scale relationships, and structural alignment, it’s clear to see that he is using video art masterfully as a medium, but with the same artistic principles as the traditional artist whose container he has rendered. Additionally, Where’s My Water? draws its form from a combination of the genres of still life and surrealism, both of which existed before television had even come into existence. While a hypnotic display of technological art, Robak’s piece is essentially object portraits, which is a concept that many photographers, sculptors, painters and other artists have interpreted to the point where it is now a common art class exercise.

Overall, Where’s My Water? is a captivating idolization of the tools we use to do our work, in which Robak demonstrates his mastery of animation and eye for classic visual design. While many examples of portraiture through objects exist, they often focus on capturing an individual. Where’s My Water? finds a common thread between us all, through our special containers that we use to hold absolutely everything essential, besides water.

Overconsumption

Two players operate paddles to collect normal heads, and deflect toxic heads towards their fellow player! Heads become toxic by consuming money or food objects and then drain the player’s opacity on contact, but when normal they add to the player’s color, signifying a positive life influence. Toxic heads revert to their original colors after a short time, representing how we can make amends to unhealthy lifestyle choices. However, if enough toxic heads come into contact with the player, the player’s head will disappear, again representing the significant impact of the people we surround ourselves with.

Update:

This project was selected for exhibition at MCC’s mediaWorks_2018. We rebuilt the project for this event and switched all the obstacles to money to make things more cohesive. It received an overwhelmingly positive response from the crowd, and served as a large attraction that stood out due to its interactivity.

IMG_2079

 

 

Development:

For our video mapping project, me and Lisha decided to create a game that would interact with real world objects. We went through a variety of gameplay concepts and began with platformers. Originally we were thinking of a Mario-like platformer where players would play on a rotating cube with a different part of the level on each side. From here we got into the idea of a platformer featuring an ant who was tunneling around this cube and building up a group of other ants in order to traverse greater distances:

IMG_1653

This morphed into a Fez-like platforming game, which ended up proving to be quite a difficult design challenge.

Therefore, we went back to our core idea of interacting with real objects and found inspiration in one of the most elegant games of all time, Pong.

However, after seeing all the lecture examples of video art having social messages and deeper meanings, we sought to combine interactivity with a message we both valued.

The resulting project is Overconsumption, a game in which two players operate paddles to defend their head from toxic heads and collect non-toxic heads. Heads become toxic by consuming money or food objects and then drain the player’s opacity on contact, but when not toxic they add to the player’s color, signifying a positive life influence. Toxic heads revert to their original colors after a short time, representing how we can make amends to unhealthy lifestyle choices. However, if enough toxic heads come into contact with the player, the player’s head will disappear, again representing the significant impact of the people we surround ourselves with.

The Machine Is Just Getting Started

My initial thought after reading this was, what steps would humanity have to take in order to get to that state? The answer was a bit chilling.

We currently have virtual reality, which presents the illusion of doing anything, so long as it’s been pre-programmed. Take away the illusion, and you have The Machine. Sure there’s sci-fi dystopic elements and some kind of bio-mechanical symbiosis with whatever the worms are, but the transition is still fairly clear. The play space of VR is a small area in which a player is confined, but the world changes entirely around them. The rooms of The Machine are small, confined spaces, where their inhabitants change the world around them to heed their every desire. The social interaction is something VR hasn’t quite gotten to yet, as VR Chat and similar games have a way of distorting social interaction into social games or negative socialization. This might have something to do with the anonymity and lack of stake in creating meaningful relationships. However, with social media, we’ve seen how social interaction can still be quite distorted without anonymity.

I’m reminded another fictional, dsytopic future: Wall-E . Wall-E is similar because humans have left Earth, succumb to their own version of The Machine in the sense that they now blindly follow their ship’s autopilot, and spend all their time in armchairs consumed by screens. However, these humans seem to have very little of the intellectual desire that was constantly highlighted in The Machine Stops. This makes me question why the society of The Machine valued their intellectualism so highly. They spent all their time lecturing and being lectured on subjects of human history and past culture, as opposed to the operation of The Machine. There was this strange corruption of the word “idea” used in the piece that, especially when getting to the point of demonizing original thoughts. Intellectualism, this great key that allowed generations past to build The Machine and the trait most valued by their artificial evolution, was warped at some point to ignore the whole aspect of inventiveness. Rather, it seemed to operate as another luxury for humans to consume and put forth circumstantially-useless knowledge. In Wall-E, just as in The Machine Stops, the awakening of the human spirit comes about from perceived knowledge of previous human life. In Wall-E, it’s a literal montage of former human culture brought on by the rediscovery of plant life. In The Machine Stops, it’s the phantom whispering of presumably ancient generations, the rediscovery of the pathway they used, and a fascination with nature affirmed upon breaching the surface. Both of these stories then result in their machines lashing out against the possible return of life before themselves, to which humanity ultimately prevails. In Wall-E there are good and evil robots with personalities somehow beyond their programming, but the message of it stands with The Machine Stops. Humanity has a desire to delegate all responsibility away from ourselves and outsource all our basic needs, so we can choose to spend our time however we’d like. While that sounds nice, it’s my personal experience that responsibilities, whether desired or not, are what produce purpose. Without these, it’s easy to imagine an extreme value placed on The Machine Stops‘s warped intellectualism and its sci-fi social network, because it produces that same purpose from fabricated responsibility. It could be argued that today most responsibilities are fabricated and our mindset isn’t that far from the society of The Machine, and honestly the more I think about that I don’t have a strong counterargument. I could quit college and go start an apple farm where I grow my own food right now, but I’m much more content following my perceived higher purpose of higher education. The difference is that my situation is absolutely not the same, not even close to the majority, of the average human experience. There are still actual apple farmers. Many do use technology to help them with their tasks, but I’d like to believe that if all of their mechanical aids suddenly broke, there would still be farmers who could produce food in as a “naked human”.

 

That argument with myself could perpetually circle between humanity’s unhealthy reliance on technology and how we aren’t along the same path as The Machine. So, what I’ll take from all this is to value real human connection, and that learning to tend a garden might not be a bad idea.